Now that the Lord’s Supper is open to all baptized members, it’s more important than ever to encourage people to affirm their baptism with a public profession of faith and to celebrate those professions joyfully.
If it’s time for some new profession of faith practices in your congregation, here are four ideas to consider. You’ll find many more ideas in Faith Formation Ministries’ new online toolkit called Professing Our Faith. It contains dozens of free resources your church can use to create a culture of commitment, encourage and invite people to profess their faith, and celebrate those professions with the whole church family.
Help people discover and shape their faith stories
Consider providing a workshop to help those who are professing their faith (and anyone else who is interested) learn how to shape their faith story and share it in public. Perhaps there’s a writer in your church who would be willing to lead this workshop several times a year. For more ideas, visit the Faith Storytelling Toolkit available from Faith Formation Ministries.
Use technology creatively
Respect people’s dread of public speaking by videotaping their testimonies and showing those videos during the profession of faith. At Pleasant Street CRC in Whitinsville, Mass., students, parents, and mentors set aside an evening to have dinner together and film the students’ testimonies for use in the worship service.
Invite alternative expressions
If the person is an artist, invite her to create a work of art that expresses some aspect of her faith and then write a short reflection on its meaning. Display the painting and publish the reflection in the worship bulletin or on the church’s website or Facebook page. If the person is a dancer or musician, invite him or her to use those gifts in the profession of faith service.
Profess in community
In addition to the testimony of the person who is professing faith, invite others in your congregation to testify to the growth they’ve observed in that person’s faith.
If you’ve developed some creative profession of faith practices, we’d love to hear about them so we can share them with other CRC churches! Please email your ideas to [email protected].
Comments
It was always important to affirm our belief in Jesus Christ, whether the Lord's Supper was open to baptized members or only confessing members. To say that this age invites more intentional thought to this milestone is to denigrate and diminish the moments and milestones of the past. Perhaps, it would be more appropriate to acknowledge that as circumstances and approaches change, it is always important to renew our understanding and approach to these very biblical milestones.
Romans 10:8-10 "But what does it say? “The word is near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart,” that is, the message concerning faith that we proclaim: If you declare with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you profess your faith and are saved."
Creative expression is wonderful but it ought not to replace the spoken word.
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